Learning to blog and maintaining a website have set me on a steep learning curve. It has also demanded that I do important inner work to free myself to say what I believe and experience in my life and in this world. There are the intricacies of creating the website and learning about blogging–which I have done in close consultation with a pro. Then there is discovering how often I can commit to writing new blogs. There is deciding what articles/essays to include under my website tabs. There is understanding how to use the items under menu under site administrations. Body, mind, and spirit have become involved. It is becoming a bracing experience.

I have become curious about the impact of this writing not only on my readers but also on me. I have learned that it is an unfolding within me as I imagine and contemplate what this blog and website mean to me and my own “living into my dying.” (I have no immediate plans to die; however, I live in the knowledge that death is not “if but when.”) I can plan an eight part series on “Biblical Stories of Women”, but I cannot guarantee when the next blog on this topic because new events, concerns or ideas often intervene.

This weekend the tension in the world has intensified. Perhaps you struggle as I do to discern and discover how the horror of the terrorist attacks in Paris impact our lives and our worldview. I ask: is what I am doing making a positive difference? I think back to the sense of comfort I had attending The Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City in October (see recent blogs), feeling as though I was among 9600 friends and well-intentioned people. Langar, the free lunch served daily by people of the Sikh faith, was indicative of the caring and kindness I felt surround us. Now I wonder whether I was safe because the world took little notice of our meeting–similar to the way I felt at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995. The only security I encountered was the Imam of Mecca surrounded by his own security team. I was shocked and then saddened when I realized that perhaps that is the only way he can travel in a world with no truly ‘safe zones.”

Doing this writing is exciting and challenging, the way I want to continue to live my life, open to welcome and unwelcome surprise, hard questions, life-enhancing adventures and relationships. Relationships: I hope to be doing this work in community with you and others; your involvement and contributions through comments and reflections are essential for this to become an interactive,lively, enterprise. Thank you for joining me.